nothing, said suddenly that
neither he nor any of the men that dwelt in the village would put out
a hand to help for all the gold of England. So Walter rested for
awhile; and still his impatience and his hunger grew.

Walter did not decide at once; he turned the matter over in his mind
for a week. He spoke no more to the bailiff, who thought he had
changed his mind; but all the week the desire grew; and at last it
completely overmastered him. He sent for the bailiff and told him he
had determined to dig out the Camp; the bailiff looked at him without
speaking. Then Walter said laughing that he meant to deal very fairly;
that no one should bear a hand in the work who did not do so
willingly; but that he should add a little to the wages of every man
who worked for him at the Camp while the work was going on. The
bailiff shrugged his shoulders and made no reply. Walter went and
spoke to each of his men and told them his offer. "I know," he said,
"that there is a story about the place, and that you do not wish to
touch it; but I will offer a larger wage to every man who works there
for me; and I will force no man to do it; but done it shall be; and if
my own men will not do it, then I will get strangers to help me." The
end of it was that three of his men offered to do the work, and the
next day a start was made.

The copse and undergrowth was first cleared, and then the big trees
were felled and dragged off the place; then the roots were stubbed up.
It was a difficult task, and longer than Walter had thought; and he
could not disguise from himself that a strange kind of ill-luck hung
about the whole affair. One of his men disabled himself by a cut from
an axe; another fell ill; the third, after these two mishaps, came and
begged off. Walter replaced them with other workers; and the work
proceeded slowly, in spite of Walter's great impatience and haste. He
himself was there early and late; the men had it in their minds that
they were searching for treasure and were well-nigh as excited as
himself; and Walter was for ever afraid that in his absence some rich
and valuable thing might be turned up, and perhaps concealed or
conveyed away secretly by the finder. But the weeks passed and nothing
was found; and it was now a bare and ugly place with miry pools of
dirt, great holes where the trees had been; there were cart tracks all
over the field in which it lay, the great trunks lay outside the
mound, and the undergrowth was pi